Educator Spotlight: Mapping with Household Materials

Ryan Lipford, this week’s Educator of the Week, challenged his students to create three-dimensional maps using data that interested them and household materials as cartography tools. Ryan teaches World Geography and Cultures to 7th graders and Modern World History to 10th graders at Edmund Burke School in Washington, D.C. How would you describe yourself as a teacher, or what is your teaching philosophy? I tend … Continue reading Educator Spotlight: Mapping with Household Materials

Blog-a-thon: Strange Maps #531: A Rio Runs Through It–Naming the American Stream

Frank Jacobs, the U.K.-based writer behind the very popular Strange Maps blog and print anthology, as well as a new New York Times series called Borderlines, has generously agreed to let us excerpt a previous post from Strange Maps for this year’s Blog-a-thon. Part of exploring communities is discovering how we define their core components, and how those definitions compare to those of other communities … Continue reading Blog-a-thon: Strange Maps #531: A Rio Runs Through It–Naming the American Stream

New “Borders” at the New York Times

MiddleEarthRisk792Kofficial1291674287.jpgAnyone who is a self-described map geek–and we number many here at National Geographic Education–can cite some formative early experiences with maps, both real and imaginary. For me, it was the Candyland map, a delicious marriage of my fledgling passions for sugar and space. I used to love to manipulate my game piece through this colorful fantasyland of gumdrop mountains and lollypop woods.

For Frank Jacobs, it was a map of the mysterious world of J.R.R Tolkien’s Middle Earth, and an incidental connection between the made-up Bree and his family’s ancestral home in the real-world Bree, in Belgium.

In the first installment of a new New York Times series called In Praise of Borders, Jacobs recounts his childhood experiences navigating Bree, in a curious corner of Europe’s German-Belgian-Dutch region shaped by a unique history. It is at once a personal yet relatable narrative.

Continue reading “New “Borders” at the New York Times”

Sarah Brumble for Atlas Obscura: Locating One’s Place in the World: Macro and Micro Cartography Across the Ages

Sarah Brumble is a Senior Editor at Atlas Obscura. When not sailing through shark-infested waters, walking into Nigeria, or visiting almost every state in the Union, she tarries forth armed with a dry sense of humor and an unreliable camera to record the curious aspects of life’s daily adventures. Of her many and varied pursuits, Sarah can most often be found sweating profusely in the … Continue reading Sarah Brumble for Atlas Obscura: Locating One’s Place in the World: Macro and Micro Cartography Across the Ages